Discussing theories and processes of civilisation and informalisation: criteriology

Abstract: Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes has been received only marginally in the USA, one of the obstacles being the absence of figurational or process studies of American society. In the first decade of this century this situation was changed by the publication of Stephen Mennell’s The American Civilizing Process (2007) and Cas Wouters’ Sex and Manners (2004) and Informalization (2007). By 2014, Randall Collins had reviewed the first and the third books in three essays (2009, 2011, 2014).

His claims about criticism of civilising and informalisation theory are discussed in this paper by placing them in the context of the reception history of Elias’s work since the 1960s, when a first round of discussion centred on criteria to be used for determining the direction of civilising processes. A second round was in the 1990s, and in this paper we contribute to a new round by presenting a summary of earlier critical discussions in an attempt to establish a more solid and subtler body of criteria for studying civilising processes. We use this in critically discussing Collins’s contributions, linking them to symbolic interactionism, American National Ideology, and blind spots in American sociology.

Keywords: civilising processes, informalisation, Norbert Elias, Randall Collins, American National Ideology, American sociology.

1. Introduction

Elias’s theory of civilising processes has been received only marginally in the USA. A major obstacle for Americans to open a discussion on the Elias perspective has been the absence of figurational or process studies of American society. In the first decade of this century this situation was changed by the publication of books by the present authors: Stephen Mennell’s The American Civilizing Process (2007) and Cas Wouters’s Sex and Manners (2004) and Informalization (2007). The American Civilizing Process is modelled on Elias’s magnum opus, On the Process of Civilisation (2012a [1939]), attempting to give a broad view of both habitus formation and state formation processes in America over the whole sweep of history since the first European settlements. Sex and Manners and Informalization deal extensively with changing manners in the USA since 1890, comparing them with these changes in three European countries.

Wouters’s studies were received favourably, among others by Peter Stearns (2007) who in his book American Cool (1994) had critically discussed both the theory of civilising processes and informalisation theory. In his later book Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (1999) he came to embrace the interpretation of an informalisation process, for example in sentences such as ‘In sum, manners became more informal while demands for systematic emotional control became more stringent’ and ‘Americans were told to become less stiff but more cautious’ (1999: 154). However, his adoption of an informalising process was left without consequence for either informalisation theory or the theory of civilising processes.

In 2009, sociologist Randall Collins was the first American to discuss Stephen Mennell’s book. He published a long and rather flippant review, thus prompting what in this paper we perceive as a third round of theoretical discussion. Collins’s critique, however, was directed primarily at Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes; he has only praise for Mennell’s discussion of the ‘macro-structural development of the US’, this part he even calls ‘a triumph’ (2009: 433). But he attributes this triumph to Mennell’s position as a foreigner and outsider, not to Elias’s theory. Collins’s critique of the theory of civilising processes spills over from Elias’s original On the Process of Civilisation to Mennell’s book and also to Wouters’s Informalization.

Collins views Elias’s theory as the ‘historicisation of Freud, a social history of the growth of the superego’, to which his main objection is that it represents a ‘deep weakness’: that it is a ‘trend theory’, with a single track that ‘goes from spontaneous instinctual expression, to external social control, to the internalisation of controls as self-restraint’ (2009: 431). The title of his review – ‘Dead end for a trend theory’ – therefore proclaims the end of the theory of civilising processes. This sounds promising, for it raises the expectation of a serious theoretical discussion.

However, Collins provides no quotations and thus leaves all of his claims unsubstantiated. This goes for his reproach that ‘the civilising process’ is essentially good, leading inevitably and in a straight line to morally better and mentally happier people – in his words, to ‘wonderful things’ such as the ‘omni-pacification of the world’, ‘world government ... benevolent socialism and universal love’ (2009: 432). It also goes for his claim that in Informalization, Wouters makes ‘a heroic effort’ to bring the counter-culture examples of informalisation ‘under the Elias paradigm with the argument that this is just a further stage of egalitarianism, and thus a continuation of the civilising process to a higher level of internalised concern for other people’ (2009: 437). These are all empty claims. To be sure, we feel tempted to argue that civilising processes surely did change direction in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the formalisation of manners lost its dominance to an informalisation of manners, but that this process of informalisation and its inherent emancipation of emotions did not bring an end to the disciplining of people. Quite the reverse: rising levels of self-regulation were demanded to live up to the relaxation of codes and cope with the increased and differentiated options. In this respect, therefore, civilising processes had continued in the same direction. But specifying this argument would be boxing the air because Collins positioned his evaluations in the air, above any onus of proof.

Moreover, Collins is unaware of several decades of sociological discussions about these questions, which can be divided into three ‘rounds’.[1]

2. The first round of discussion

Confusing the direction of civilising processes and its evaluation is a major problem. This error was made in the 1970s by Dutch sociologists who, like Collins today, also understood Elias’s theory as a single-track or unilinear theory of increasing affect-control. From this perception it follows that the level of civilisation rises if self-control rises, as a result of which asking for the direction of the civilising process is almost automatically turned into asking for its evaluation.

An example can be taken from the work of Brinkgreve and Korzec, who simplified Elias’s theory as ‘the theory of increasing self-control’ (1976: 29). These Dutch sociologists conducted research into social changes between the 1950s and the 1970s, and in an early report they concluded that an interpretation in terms of Elias’s theory was impossible for want of a clear criterion. As such, they explained, the concept of self-control is too ambiguous, for it may connote repression as well as mastery of emotions. In the eyes of Brinkgreve and Korzec, this ambiguity made the theory irrefutable because self-control appeared as repressive or oppressive (bad) on the one hand, and as mastery (good) on the other. They omitted to study their data for the possibility that growing leniency in the codes of conduct implied a change from having to control towards being able to control and/or express emotions, a change towards the ‘emancipation of emotions’ as it was conceptualised by Wouters.

Dutch sociologist Nico Wilterdink (1973) did the same. That Elias does not interpret the relaxation of codes after the First World War ‘as a “reversal” of the civilising process, because it occurred in the context of a far-reaching degree of affect-control’ met with his judgement ‘that way, every manifest change towards diminishing control can be tucked away’.

Collins appears to be in good Dutch company, although it is company of at least 35–40 years ago. Therefore, to those familiar with the two rounds of discussion on Elias’s work in the Netherlands, much of his critique reads like returning to old polemical issues. The first round of discussions was in the 1960s and 1970s, when everywhere in ‘the West’ taboo after taboo was broken, and when the increase of ‘permissiveness’ was welcomed with relief by some and experienced by others as a forerunner of a breakdown of civilisation.

This last interpretation was to be discussed more extensively in the second round of discussion, in the early 1990s. Interest in the direction of civilising processes flourished again because of shifts in global balances of power, especially the tensions and conflicts surrounding the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia (Mennell 1994). The interconnected outbreaks of violence and various insecurities in international relations in particular had triggered new interest in the direction of civilising processes. The new key concepts were disintegration of states and decivilising processes.

The first round of discussion started in the late 1960s when increasing numbers of students, among others, read the new German edition of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. In Amsterdam, particularly among sociologists and historians, the discussion centred on the questions of whether the civilising process had changed direction and what the observed changes meant for the theory of civilising processes. In 2009, Collins has raised the same questions regarding changes in the USA. Already in his first paragraph, his stance is unambiguous: ‘from the point of view of the Norbert Elias theory, the US would seem to be leader of the decivilising process’.

This stance is debatable, but let us first present some ‘Old’ criticism of Collins’s description of the ‘deepest weakness’: ‘The civilising process starts with spontaneous impulses, essentially Freud’s Id, which are gradually brought under social control and then internal control’ (2009: 440). The formulation suggests a beginning and a sequence that are both non-existent. There is no zero or starting point in civilising processes (as Elias endlessly stressed), if only because children are universally raised according to the codes of parents, their representatives and the survival group they are born and raised in.

That sequence is an ‘old’ misunderstanding, too. It is as if self-controls take over from social controls and the latter diminish or erode where self-control emerges. This is not the case. Indeed, in the long-term phase of formalisation covered by Elias in his major book, what he calls the ‘social constraint towards self-constraint’ tends predominantly towards conscience formation – to the transformation of direct fear of others into an inner fear transmitted via conscience into a more or less automatically functioning ‘second nature’. This implied a change in the exercise of social controls: whereas before they were directed at preventing people from becoming involved in forbidden situations and relations, thus blocking possibilities of yielding to temptation, they became increasingly exercised on the self-regulation of people who are now expected to prevent transgressions under their own steam. External social controls changed direction, but did not diminish. On the contrary: the social sanctioning of behaviour showing a flawed control of conscience gained ascendancy.

In the first round of discussion, Wouters drew attention to the process of informalisation in an article (in Dutch) entitled ‘Has the civilising process changed direction?’(1976). In processes of social competition and interweaving, people have come to pressure each other to more reflexive and flexible manners and thus also to a type of self-regulation attuned to these manners. More often, and time and again, they were faced with the task of surmounting their fears with regard to social and psychic authorities. In this process, various emotions and impulses entered consciousness and public discussion. With this ‘emancipation of emotions’ much self-evident repression changed in the direction of obvious temptation. All in all, the pressure of social controls on individuals mounted and again changed direction: the locus and focus of social controls increasingly came to rest with a sprightly conscious self-regulation (Ego), if only because of the need to live up to mounting demands of flexible, sensitive and deliberate manners and manoeuvring.

In this 1976 article, Wouters pointed out that Elias never used just ‘increase’ or ‘decrease’ of self-restraints as a criterion, but always expressed himself in a more subtle way: ‘Individuals are compelled to regulate their conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner (Elias 2012a: 406). He also referred to ‘more all-round’ and ‘more automatic’ self-restraints. ‘More all-round’ refers to a trend towards social standards of self-restraint applying more uniformly to all situations and relations: social demands for extreme self-control in specific situations becoming increasingly less compatible with an equally extreme readiness to act in accordance with one’s impulses in other situations. ‘More even’ refers to a diminution of extremes, by becoming less volatile and more even-tempered or steady in all types of relations. ‘More automatic’ refers to the spread of a second-nature type of habitual self-restraints.[2]

Furthermore, Wouters discredited the efficacy of using just one criterion: ‘All kinds of interconnected criteria are included in the theory of civilising processes’ (1976: 340). In Part Four of Elias’s book, entitled ‘Overview: Towards a theory of civilising processes’, next to the balance of controls – the balance between external and internal social controls – various other criteria apply. One is the balance of power (or, better, ‘power ratio’): ‘Increasing constraints on the upper class: increasing pressure from below.’ A lessening of power inequalities induces the spread of informal manners and emancipation of emotions. Brinkgreve and Korzec ignored this connection by placing it outside the theory. After having concluded that Elias’s theory cannot be confirmed or contradicted, they turned to look for ‘other explanations’, and pointed to the lessening of inequalities (and to the growth of wealth), thus reducing the civilising theory once again to its self-restraint component (1976: 30).

Last but not least was the point that it makes little or no sense to discuss isolated examples and to try to assess whether they prop up the theory or not. A recent example is Collins’s discussion of obscene speech and his interpretation of efforts at prohibition as ‘a reversion to external constraint’ (2009: 437). Well, yes, there are many more similar examples in other fields, where external controls were expanded and intensified because increasing numbers of people started to calculate the risk of not buying a ticket on public transport, or of cheating to pay less tax or to receive more social welfare benefits. Thus, the level of trust in the self-controls of clients and citizens declined, and authorities organised more and firmer social controls. But the theoretical point is that it makes little or no sense to discuss one isolated example, for the theoretical relevance of a range of systematically obtained examples only stands out in the context of changes in the whole balance of controls, and in related balances such as power ratios. What counts are changes in the whole pattern of controls and their relation to other yardsticks or criteria of civilising processes.

3. The second round of discussion

Nico Wilterdink reduced the theory of civilising processes to its self-restraint component in the first round, and he kept doing it in the second round of discussion of the 1990s. In a special issue of Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift on the theory, he wrote that the direction of civilising processes according to Elias can be determined from the question whether self-control has become more or less all-round, even and differentiated, and that these criteria are insufficient (1995). In a reaction entitled ‘Criteriology’ (1997), Wouters concluded that it was apparent that the result of the first round of discussion was that the single criterion for determining the direction of civilising processes had been somewhat differentiated, but that the fallacy of self-control being the criterion had remained.

This thought, Wouters argued in ‘Criteriology’, albeit typical of the Amsterdam discussion, is not to be found in Elias’s work. Subsequently, he pleaded again in favour of other theoretical criteria such as the scope of identification between individuals and groups, psychologisation and rationalisation, diminishing contrast and increasing varieties, and all the other criteria mentioned as headings in Part Four of On the Process of Civilisation.

In his response to ‘Criteriology’, Wilterdink (1997) presented two arguments against ‘bringing in’ more criteria. The first reason was that more criteria block the possibility of making a distinction between describing civilising processes and explaining them: ‘If, for example, state formation is part of a civilising process, it is impossible to argue simultaneously that state formation is at the basis of the civilising process. The explanation of civilising and decivilising processes can never be found if everything is included in these processes.’ Wilterdink apparently thinks that the direction of these processes can be determined by something outside them. In our view there is nothing against seeing and studying the entire history of humankind from the perspective of the theory of civilising processes. It would mean searching for the interconnections included in the theory, such as interconnections between social and psychic structures and processes. Apparently Wilterdink confuses ‘process’ and ‘theory’.

Incidentally, we do not believe Elias ever claimed that state formation was the basis or ‘cause’ of the civilising process. He shuns such a causal formulations because a cause of social and psychic processes is as rare as a beginning. In his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences, with which Wilterdink is certainly familiar (see Wilterdink 1977), but to which Collins makes no reference, Elias (2007, 2009a) makes clear that while simple billiard-ball causal models are appropriate in the physical–chemical sciences, the biological sciences already require four-dimensional models of developmental processes through time, while the social sciences involve five-dimensional models, in which human experience forms the fifth dimension in addition to space and time. A hint of this can be seen in the summary statement that he makes at the end of the (original) first volume of On the Process of Civilisation:

But note that, although the internal pacification of everyday life within a territory is essential – by means of the gradual monopolisation by the forces of the state of the legitimate right to employ the means of violence – state formation processes are not the single prime mover of habitus-formation processes. Rather, a whole series of part-processes are intertwined with each other in a spiral process. Internal pacification promotes trade over longer distances, which promotes the division of labour and economic growth and the growth of towns, which yield increased taxes, supporting more effective administration, bigger armies and bigger wars to acquire more territory, which leads to still more extensive internal pacification, and so on. Thus, many processes for which social scientists have separate words – state formation, division of labour, economic growth, urbanisation, bureaucratisation, and so on – are not in empirical fact separate from each other. And it is the overall process which, according to the theory of civilising processes, exerts a steady external constraint towards self-constraint.

Earlier figurations develop into later figurations; they are not the beginning or the cause of later figurations. Nor can later figurations explain earlier ones.[3] Developments largely proceed as a ‘blind process’ – that is, although they are the product of the interweaving of the plans and intentions of the countless people involved, their overall course is unplanned and purposeless – and they often go hand in hand with counter-processes, which implies that the course of developments could have been different. The process-sociological task is to demonstrate empirically how earlier figurations have developed into later ones, keeping an eye open for counter-developments or ‘counter-histories’ (Goudsblom 1995: 262).

Thus, a process of state formation is certainly to be included as part of a civilising process, but not as part of the theory of civilising processes, because in some groups the confinement and control of violence as a means of settling conflicts is achieved differently. Anyway, state formation is not among the titles of sections in Elias’s ‘Overview: towards a theory of civilising processes’, but the ‘courtisation’ or ‘taming of the warriors’ – in short, pacification – is included.

The second reason why Wilterdink is against ‘bringing in’ more criteria is that it enlarges arbitrariness. The various criteria bring contradicting results, he argues, and contradictions necessarily lead to arbitrary interpretations because an unambiguous decisive answer is unattainable. This may hold some water, but only from a static point of view. The existence of processes and counter-processes makes nonsense of attempts at reaching out for unambiguous decisive answers. In any period, civilising and decivilising trends can be discerned, although usually at different levels of integration as, for example, in violence within states and violence between states. The same goes for integrating and disintegrating trends, if only because processes of integration imply ‘integration conflicts’ (see Mennell 2007: 214–48).

Take for example the social integration of many societies in the 1960s and 1970s when the economy was expanding, wealth was rising and a general material security spread (in many countries also via the arrangements of a welfare state). This social integration at the level of states went hand in hand with rising relational insecurity and decreasing interdependence on the level of families. Many families disintegrated and there was a sharp increase of divorce.

The search for an unambiguous assessment of civilising or decivilising traits from an arbitrary variety of examples therefore seems sterile. Confronted with passing and partial processes and counter-processes at several levels of integration, the process question is which of the two, civilising and decivilising trends, is dominant (see Dunning and Mennell 1998).

Another reason for rejecting law-like mechanistic causal relations between changes in self-control and changes in power ratios – as effected, for example, in state formation processes – is that changes in the balance of power and in the balance of controls cannot be studied separately because they are heavily entangled: exercising social control is exercising a form of power. Therefore, the study of changes in ways of exercising social controls cannot avoid all ambiguity, because these controls open a window on power and dependency relations while being an integral part of these relations.[4]

In his response, however, Wilterdink insists on the necessity of being unambiguous. Without it, he writes, the question of whether the highly organised and disciplined violence of the Nazi destruction camps can count as ‘decivilising’, cannot be answered, except arbitrarily. But this arbitrariness only exists owing to the arbitrary isolation of this moment in time from a larger framework and a longer process.

Four years later, Abram de Swaan (2001) raised the same point about the destruction camps of Nazi Germany, where decivilised activities took place in ‘reserves of destruction’, while the rest of society remained pacified as before. De Swaan describes how these secluded places allowed for a psychic, social and geographical process of compartmentalisation to take place. By the inclusion of compartments of destruction and barbarity, the course of the civilising process was ‘bent’. This bending he calls a process of dyscivilisation.

Compartmentalisation as a defence mechanism is incompatible with a process of informalisation or with a transition ‘from management of relations through command to management through negotiation’, as De Swaan termed it (1990), because dyscivilising societies tend to foster strong, but also quite rigid types of social control and self-control.

This behaviour touches upon two of the criteria mentioned by Elias, the evenness and all-roundness of constraints, for the existence of a compartment of cruelty and fury implies that the civilised restraints are neither altogether all-round nor even. De Swaan’s description can be compared with Elias’s description of

Using De Swaan’s and Elias’s words, Nazi Germany was a society in which strong but rather rigid types of social control and self-control prevailing in most situations was perfectly compatible with an equally extreme readiness to act out all conceivable cruelty and fury in a highly specific and confined situation. The comparison shows the importance of a standard of controls with criteria for ‘greater evenness and all-roundness in all, not only in some situations’ and ‘removed from extremes’ (Elias in Wouters 2007: 232–3). It also shows that the same goes for social controls.

One of the conclusions of Wouters’s study of changes in the codes of manners and emotion regulation over more than a century is that ‘both major wars and their aftermath seem to have had little independent lasting effect on the overall trend’ and ‘that the barbarity of the wars was of small significance for overall developments in regimes of manners and emotions’ (2007: 173). To do justice to the horrors of periods full of violence such as these two World Wars is only possible, of course, by zooming in on the atrocities. Inquiry into the significance of these periods within long-term processes, however, demands a higher level of detachment, which may arise from zooming in and out, by studying events alternately from a smaller and a greater distance. Thus their place can be seen from short-term as well as from a long-term perspective, which includes a view on the moment when time stood still in horror as well as on the partial and passing moment of decivilisation. As long as the first view dominates and the second one hurts, mourning and/or shame prevail. In that case, the long-term perspective may lose so much validity and meaning that it meets with moral indignation.

4. The third round of discussion

Not World Wars, but culture wars and informalisation, are in the centre of the third round of discussion, which was triggered by the American sociologists Collins and Davetian. Both misunderstand informalisation. Collins’s main attempt is to show there is no such thing as informalisation – that it is in fact decivilisation – and Davetian’s critique of Elias’s theory of civilising processes fans out in many directions (see reviews by Goudsblom 2011, and Wouters 2010).

5. Symbolic interactionism and the concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘trend’

Two more general questions arise from Collins’s 2009 and 2014 essays. They centre on the concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘trend’. Collins, implicitly or explicitly, does not greatly care for these concepts, which also appear problematic from a symbolic interactionist perspective. Both Collins and symbolic interactionism are born and raised in the USA. The concepts ‘habitus’ and ‘trend’ appear to represent distinctly ‘un-American’ habits of thought.

6. Some concluding remarks

We began by noting the scant attention paid among American social scientists to the work of Norbert Elias. With a few exceptions – a notable instance being Steven Pinker’s (2011) study of the long-term decline in interpersonal violence – they have continued to ignore Elias, even though over the last four decades he has come to be recognised across much of the rest of the world as one of the most important and sophisticated sociological thinkers of the twentieth century. Such commentaries on, or uses of, Elias as have emanated from the United States have tended to be over-simplistic. And not just that: they have tended to be based on a reading only of Elias’s 1939 magnum opus, taking no account of his own elaborations of his ideas in a mass of books and articles from the 1970s and 1980s, let alone of the thriving ‘process’ or ‘figurational’ research tradition.

Much of our article has been devoted to explaining four decades of research and academic research, in response particularly to Collins’s and Davetian’s critiques of Mennell, Wouters and Elias – and attempting to understand the weaknesses of reception of process sociology in the USA.

It begins to seem that there is something in American political culture, as well as in academic traditions that reflect it, that poses a major obstacle to an adequate understanding of Elias and of ‘figurational’ or ‘process’ sociology. From this perspective, a striking similarity between Davetian, Collins, and also Stearns, appears significant.

Stearns embraced the interpretation of an informalisation process but continued to reject both informalisation and civilising theory; Davetian seems to accept and reject parts of both theories but in a cavalier treatment; and while Collins embraced the ‘macro-structural development of the US’ as presented by Mennell, he contradicts his endorsement with an extensive negative critique of both theories, written offhandedly without a single reference. This similarity between these three American theorists, particularly Collins’s refusal to go along with academic traditions in not providing references, can be understood as stemming from a lazy assumption that is characteristic of those who assume their position to be inviolable.

Collins’s views are in so many ways quintessentially American. Mennell (2007: 312; 2011) has likened the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world to a one-way mirror in a social psychological observation laboratory. This seems characteristic of centres of power – global power, in this case – and of highly unequal established–outsider relations (Elias 2004) between the established in the centre and those outside.[9]Billions of educated people outside the USA know an immense amount about America, its constitution, its politics, its manners and culture; all these are extremely visible to the rest of the world. But America’s huge power advantage seems to function something like a black hole: a mass of survey evidence suggests that Americans do not see out at all clearly, and tend to think about the ‘outside world’—if at all—in stereotypical and indeed Manichean terms. This principle operates as much in the academic world as in the wider political and social realm. The Americans’ power surplus remains firmly connected to collective superiority feelings on the one hand, and on the other is anchored to an American National Ideology of individualism and self-determination and to a focus on ideas and ‘values’; and their gaze is turned away from interdependence – that is, from questions of power and unequal dependence – and from habitus.

Judging from a lazy assumption in the work of these three social scientists when writing about theories of civilisation and informalisation, feelings of superiority function as a major obstacle to a wider reception of process sociology. Perhaps its chances will advance with the rise of China and others as global powers, obliging Americans to remove more and more of the one-way screen behind which they live, and thus making them more inclined to realise more fully the significance of power relations and interdependencies, theoretically as well as practically.

Notes

1. For a more detailed discussion of the ‘first round’ of debate in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly among Dutch sociologists and anthropologists, see Mennell (1998 [1989]: 227–50).

2. Elias also introduced two other useful concepts in his own discussion of informalisation: he distinguished between the formality–informality span of a society – which concerns the synchronic gradient between formality and informality – and the formality–informality gradient observed in the course of social development, the diachronic gradient of informalisation (Elias, 2013: 32).

3. See Elias (2012b), chapter 6, ‘The problem of the “inevitability” of social development’.

4. It is a sad irony that Elias drew attention to social and self-controls in the 1930s, connecting emotions to changing balances of power, and yet so many social scientists today break the connection he made between the regulation of emotions and power ratios. It is equally ironic that most of those who describe themselves as working in the ‘sociology of emotions’ have little or no interest in connections between emotions and power (and the minority who do have such an interest hardly ever use Elias’s theory).

5. It needs to be borne in mind that when Americans speak of ‘the middle class’, they mean what the rest of the world calls the ‘working class’, a term they avoid because of its Marxist connotations that are incompatible with American National Ideology. In American usage, ‘middle class’ includes everyone in any kind of steady employment; only the ‘underclass’ are below it.

6. For an outstanding study of how this worked in the expanding London ‘Society’ of the nineteenth century, see Davidoff (1973).

7. We should like to thank Helmut Kuzmics, University of Graz, Austria, for drawing our attention to this point.

8. It thus fails even to attempt a solution to the so-called ‘macro–micro problem’ in sociological theory, to which in our view Elias’s is by far the most sophisticated solution offered to date. Collins’s own most ambitious attempt, in Interaction Ritual Chains (2004) remains essentially at the interactional level.

9. See also Mennell’s further development of this idea in his essay ‘Explaining American hypocrisy’ (2015).

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Biographical Notes

Cas Wouters is a sociologist who has elaborated his theory of informalisation in a variety of studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and psychic processes, focusing mainly on the regimes of manners and emotions in dying and mourning, in relationships between classes, sexes, and generations. This focus demonstrated the many faces of an informalisation of manners and an ‘emancipation of emotions’. These studies have resulted in numerous articles and books. His study of changes in German, Dutch, English and American manners books resulted in two monographs, ‘twins’: Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000 (2004) and Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (2007), both translated into Dutch and Chinese.

Stephen Mennell is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College Dublin, from which he retired in 2009. He read economics at Cambridge (1963–66), and then spent the year 1966–67 in the old Department of Social Relations at Harvard, before teaching at the University of Exeter (1967–1990) and at Monash University, Australia (1990–93). His books include: All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (1985), Norbert Elias: Civilisation and the Human Self-Image (1989; paperback Norbert Elias: An Introduction, 1992, 1998), and The American Civilizing Process (2007). He holds the degrees of Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen (Amsterdam) and Doctor of Letters (Cambridge). He is a member of the Board of the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam, of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Royal Irish Academy, and of Academia Europaea.